Did you mean 'not remaining in metastable failure' ?

I was under the impression that once you learned how to pet the cat forwards (the non-triviality of getting to that point being an oft cited adoption barrier, but still), Riak was really quite excellent at recovering from things going wrong, which would fit with that being what you were trying to say.

Or maybe my guess has gone completely wide, in which case please do break out the small words and crayon drawings and explain what you actually meant :)

What does metastability mean in this context? I've only seen it used to mean "appears stable but not actually stable", eg systems that resist small perturbations but never return to nominal after bigger disturbance (like cold boot).

Did you mean "stability"?

I'm not aware of any definition of metastability that would be a desirable property of a system. Vaguely speaking, in my understanding metastability in physics, chemistry and electronics refers to a state that has not yet fully settled and the final state is therefore undeterminable / random.

Could you elaborate your understanding of the term? I can see it related to concepts like eventual consistency, just unclear of how it would be considered a positive characteristic. I'd have thought that a deterministic outcome would be important in a database system?